Stillness is the move for video artist

Artist Adad Hannah displays his work at the San Antonio Museum of Art on August 31, 2012.

Artist Adad Hannah displays his work at the San Antonio Museum of Art on August 31, 2012.

Photo: Tom Reel, San Antonio Express-News

Photo: Tom Reel, San Antonio Express-News

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Artist Adad Hannah displays his work at the San Antonio Museum of Art on August 31, 2012.

Artist Adad Hannah displays his work at the San Antonio Museum of Art on August 31, 2012.

Photo: Tom Reel, San Antonio Express-News

Stillness is the move for video artist

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The movement in Adad Hannah's videos is so subtle — the blink of an eye or the intake of breath by a model holding a pose — that museum-goers often mistake the digital works for photographs displayed in light boxes.

A fair number probably leave exhibitions none the wiser, but that's OK with the Canadian artist, known for video and photographic works using or inspired by objects in museum collections.

“They might like it, but they don't see it as a video,” Hannah says. “I have a lot of people come and say, ‘What is this?' To me it seems obvious that it's a video playing on a plasma screen, but I think because it doesn't quite look like a TV and there's no movement, somehow people think it's some kind of new thing.”

To be fair, it probably doesn't help the unsuspecting viewer that the videos are often displayed with Hannah's photographs as in “Intimate Encounters,” currently at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Part of Fotoseptiembre USA, an annual international photography festival, the show is one of three organized by SAMA curators to tie in with “Aphrodite and the Gods of Love,” also on display at the museum.

Curated by David Rubin, “Intimate Encounters” includes “Daydreams of a Drunken Scholar,” a new series of works commissioned by and created at the museum. Rubin invited Hannah to exhibit at SAMA after he saw “Eros and Aphrodite,” an earlier work by the artist, at an international art fair. When he saw the piece, he knew he had found a complement to the “Aphrodite” exhibit.

“First of all, I noticed that it looked real intriguing, but then I went over to it, and ‘Oh, my god! It's called “Eros and Aphrodite.” Eureka!'” says Rubin, the museum's curator of contemporary art.

The piece produced at the Museo Nacional del Prado is included in the exhibition. It features two models — a man and a woman — leaning in as if to kiss the lips of a double-headed bust of the Greek gods of love. The pair are all but frozen in place for the duration of the video — 7 minutes and 18 seconds.

“I liked the Janus head, the fact that it was two sculptures that had been glued together a thousand years ago, or whenever the piece was made,” Hannah says.

Then there are the implications of that imperfectly suspended moment.

“It's a marble sculpture, but then it could somehow be brought to life by the kiss or something,” he says. “But then also, because of the double head you have him kissing her through the sculpture.”

In addition to the video, the exhibit features two photographic images of the models in the same pose with the sculpture, but in these the man and woman are isolated.

“Different things end up happening with the videos and with the photographs,” Hannah says. “The photograph — even if you know it's a staged photograph — it's like a fulcrum. You imagine here, I think, a second after the photo was taken, she's kissing him and the moment before that, she's standing away from him. You feel like it's caught in this moment, whereas in the video that moment is undermined. That's what it looks like when you first see it, but then you realize she's not going to kiss the sculpture and she hasn't just been there, she's been there for minutes.”

Born in New York, Hannah — a slight figure with an open, friendly face and a head of corkscrew curls — spent his early years in Israel and England. He moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s, after his parents split up. Currently, he lives and works between Vancouver and Montreal.

As an undergraduate, Hannah studied printmaking, “but I ended up doing all kinds of things,” he says. “Then (I) started doing photography and video maybe 10 years ago now.”

His work is influenced by early photography as well as the tableau vivant, a common practice in the 19th century in which costumed actors presented a “living picture.”

“I guess the central idea around a lot of the work is the tableau vivant, so the performed pose and the performed picture and how that relates to photography,” he says. “And it started dealing with early photography when the model had to stand still for so long. So I guess I was thinking about this, and then I realized that it leads to a kind of thinking about stillness and about performance and about photography. That nexus is what's interesting to me.”

Hannah's videos are not played on a loop. Rather, the screen is allowed to go black for a few seconds, to emphasize the real time element.

“For me, when something loops, when it seamlessly just goes on, it loses its about-timeness,” he says. “Whereas this ... you feel maybe more like you're watching a performance.”

The exhibit at SAMA also features works from the series “Blocking Adam and Eve,” including a photograph and two videos, and “Unwrapping Rodin,” a suite of four photographs.

In researching Hannah's work, Rubin discovered a subtle erotic quality in various series.

“So I contacted Adad and I said, ‘I hope this isn't a stretch, but I see this erotic undercurrent in your work' and mentioned the Aphrodite show and what we wanted to do, and he said, yeah, he doesn't really think about it when he's making the work, but somehow it's there.”

Hannah visited SAMA in January to see the museum's collections. He spent time studying Japanese prints, including the erotic shunga prints featured in “Love in Three Capitals,” curated by John Johnston.

“He and I were both in agreement that two rooms in the Asian wing — the scholar's library and the opium bedroom — just lend themselves beautifully to narrative,” Rubin says. “We obviously couldn't shoot in there, nor could we use those objects because they're very fragile ... so we decided to construct a hybrid environment inspired by those two rooms.”

When Hannah returned in April, he spent several days selecting objects and building a set in a section of the second floor contemporary galleries that had been de-installed with the help of museum staff.

“They really let me dig deep here,” Hannah says. “When I was here, they took me to see everything and not just what's on the walls, but everything in storage. It was really like carte blanche.”

Oriental rugs borrowed from two local dealers served as the backdrop and flooring, while objects from museum's collections were used as props. Rubin acted as casting director, finding most of the models for Hannah's work.

“It was really amazing,” Hannah says. “I mean it was a bit stressful, too, because some of these carpets are like $130,000.”

The artist includes small arrangements of objects he thinks of as still lifes within each carefully composed scene.

“I'm quite particular when I'm shooting something, so like with these for instance,” he says, indicating a group of Irish silver in one of the images, “this might be at a weird angle, and I then I want to change it, but I can't touch it, so I have to call a registrar. Preparatory would put on gloves and move it, but it worked out well.”

The works he produced at SAMA include “Two Body Equilibrium,” a four-minute video featuring twin brothers dressed only in matching loin cloths. One lies on the floor with his arms stretched out to hold the ankles of the other, who is performing a handstand. Only the slight quiver of muscle gives the image away as video. In the photograph “Gifts (Wrapped and Unwrapped),” the bodies of models, loosely draped in costumes made out of Japanese fabrics, intertwine in a pair of groupings.

“I realize that there's erotic elements in my work, and I feel like they always just kind of creep up,” he says. “This is the first time to kind of deal with it explicitly. It was actually kind of hard for me. I wasn't good at telling people to take their clothes off.”